Hello! I got my new computer and got Lethal Company and Welcome To The Dark Place projects both running on it, so 2025 is underway. As a result of this, Welcome To The Dark Place progress waned a little bit as I expected, and I worried it would be hard to pick up speed on it again, but I've started making incredible progress again only after like five days.
My interest lately has mainly been in developing the "overworld" of the Dark Place and making it interesting to traverse. I don't know if that's because I get dopamine from seeing the map visually update very quickly, or if it's because I just really do need to focus on the map/overworld. The areas highlighted in red are the areas which have been my focus.
The bottom area in this image just flat out didn't exist until yesterday, because I had just never gotten around to it. Without getting into the nitty gritty of what that even means for this text-based game, I will say it's a huge milestone, because now there are basically no "invisible walls" in the world.
Okay, I will explain a little more. Back in 2019 I set the game's scope much larger than I should have, essentially deciding that the Dark Place is a 100x100 grid of text nodes--not quite realizing that would mean I have to fill in 10,000 squares with unique text and audio and scenarios. (And that's just on the surface.) Well I've spent the past five years lazily adding in those squares from time to time, usually with blank space and generic descriptions before filling it in with actual content. Now that's "done." You can technically explore the entire Dark Place, though parts of it are still barren wastelands, kind of like zooming into Google Earth before it's finished loading. Even then, I had to cut down the size a little bit and cut corners wherever I could (quality over quantity), so it's more like 6000 squares.
The problem is that, being a text-based game, any one of those squares could contain like 300 squares within it, and that's just up to how I'm feeling. That's the beauty of a text-based game but also a curse.
Let's look at how much of the map I had finished by June 2020.
Oh. That looks like maybe 20% of what the map is now, but it's really like 7%.
So anyway, now I could technically choose to release the game, and the only thing I have to do is finish adding the main objective into the map. But that's almost already done. It's really just a race against time, trying to give love and attention to every part of this map before October (at the latest.) There is something very freeing about the game being "finished" at long last.